Elaheh Abbas Zadeh

My practice explores the lingering presence of nature: what remains within us after an encounter with a landscape, a colour, a texture, or a fleeting sensory experience. Rather than depicting nature as it appears, I am interested in translating its afterimage: the emotional, physical, and psychological traces it leaves behind.

Working with mixed media, I build densely textured surfaces through an intuitive and tactile process. I often use my hands directly, pressing, dragging, layering, and moving material across the surface. This physical contact is central to my practice. It allows the work to develop through touch, rhythm, pressure, and instinct, creating a direct relationship between body, material, and memory.

My paintings emerge through accumulation and transformation. Forms gather, dissolve, and reappear; colours collide and recede; surfaces shift between density and openness. At times, the works suggest petals, foliage, water, earth, or organic growth, yet they resist fixed representation. I am less interested in describing a particular place than in giving form to what persists after experiencing it: fragments of sensation, atmosphere, movement, and memory.

As an Iranian artist based in the UK, I am conscious of the way...